I'm using DevOps for source control on some projects for which I am the sole developer. In the last couple weeks, I've gotten a couple strange failures when pushing to remote. The error message is this:

Error: master -> master (TF402455: Pushes to this branch are not permitted; you must use a pull request to update this branch.)

followed by:

failed to push some refs to (the right URL).

After looking around on the internet, I found various references to this, but none of them seemed quite applicable. What I can do is branch the repo, push the branch, then merge the branch back to master, but this is only for a few projects. Some projects have no problem pushing to master, others no longer allow it.

I'm pretty sure I could wipe the repo out of DevOps, build a new one, and push that. Losing the history wouldn't cause any real issues for these particular projects, but it's annoying.

What I'm looking for is both a way to solve this without delete and replace, and perhaps a suggestion as to why it started happening?